The Little Channel That Could

By ALEX MINDLIN

Published: January 1, 2006

WHEN New York's transit union voted to strike in the wee hours of Dec. 20, an anxious city learned the news from a boyish-looking 28-year-old reporter named Bobby Cuza, who was working out of the Grand Hyatt, in a cramped conference room strewn with cameras, battery chargers, half-empty boxes of cookies, and dozing technicians.

The other reporters in the media encampment were generally better equipped; most of them had laptops, and Channel 4 even had a little snack buffet. But at 1:28 that groggy Tuesday morning, it was Mr. Cuza, a reporter for NY1 News, the city's round-the-clock local cable channel, who broke the strike story, thanks to tips he had gotten from sources inside the union.

His scoop came as a decided surprise to his colleagues.

''Did you just report that there was a strike?'' one reporter from another channel demanded.

Another asked plaintively, ''Why didn't you tell us?''

Since taking to the air on Sept, 8, 1992, New York's smallest and youngest major TV station has been the subject of considerable mockery. But NY1 has quietly turned into a force to be reckoned with, one whose strengths were powerfully apparent during the strike that ended 10 days ago.

By the time the strike was over, 60 hours after it had begun, NY1 had scored a number of firsts. It was the first station to conduct a sit-down interview with Larry Reuter, president of New York City Transit, and the first to report that both sides were resuming negotiations. At times, it was the most-viewed station in New York.

Even the local Web log Gothamist weighed in, describing the station's performance during the strike as ''awesome.''

''NY1's goal was not just to be a little brother or sister to what the other stations were doing,'' said David Diaz, a longtime reporter at Channels 4 and 2 who now teaches courses on media and politics at City College. ''They wanted to be players in the same game. For a long time they didn't have the resources to do that. But now you go to places that have TV's on all the time, and you'll see NY1.''

The Land of 'One-Man Bands'

A joke about NY1 circulates in local television circles. They call it New York One, people say, because it's just one guy.

The station is famous, some would say infamous, for sending reporters out as ''one-man bands'' -- in other words, holding their own cameras and microphones. At news scenes, NY1 reporters are often the ones standing in front of unmanned tripods, asking other reporters to nudge the camera into place, or jostling for a shot alongside other stations' burly, unionized cameramen. In the channel's early days, Mr. Diaz recalled, NY1 reporters ''were often mistaken for people doing their college TV show.''

With an annual budget of about $25 million, about half the figure for some other local stations, NY1 still keeps its belt tight. The station has no helicopter; when it needs a ''chopper shot,'' it borrows video from other stations. A starting reporter earns about $40,000 a year, roughly half what a New York network affiliate would pay. On occasion, the broadcast still has the feel of an operation held together with Scotch tape; the audio sometimes drop out, and voiceovers step on the ends of sound bites. Segments like ''In the Papers,'' in which Pat Kiernan summarizes articles from the local dailies, are decidedly low-tech.

Even the anchors lack support staff. Before going on the air the other day, John Schiumo, the 34-year-old host of NY1's call-in show, ''The Call,'' dashed into the control room and viciously dabbed his face with foundation. ''We all do our own makeup,'' he admitted. ''And we hate it.''

NY1 was founded by Time Warner Cable, which still owns the channel, distributing it exclusively to its own subscribers in New York and some suburbs. (In eastern Brooklyn and the Bronx, where Time Warner is not available, the channel is shown through Cablevision.)

Despite limited distribution, NY1 has grown over the years. It has gone from a 100-person operation to a newsroom of 220. It reaches 2.2 million homes, of which 52,000 tuned in during three hours of an average morning in November. This is fewer than the networks got, but more New Yorkers than were watching either MSNBC or the Fox News Channel.

NY1 is housed in a giant, high-ceiling 25,000-square-foot space (formerly the set of the gritty HBO prison series ''Oz'') above the Chelsea Market on Ninth Avenue at 16th Street. With its low cubicles and glass-walled offices, it resembles a traditional newsroom, but with surrealistic touches: Steve Paulus, the general manager, works out of a smoked-glass box that hangs alarmingly over the newsroom.

Reporters sit near the entrance of the newsroom, and visitors can often hear them muttering to themselves as they test out lines for a voiceover.

On the first day of the strike, Josh Robin, the Albany reporter, perched on his desk and intoned, as if recounting the Kennedy assassination: ''Everybody's going to have memories of where they were during the strike. Mine's going to be when Tom Kelly, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman, somberly came to the podium and said that the union had walked out.''